Life Sayings (Part 5)

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers

“Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” – Lilly Tomlin

“Whatever you think you are, that’s not what you are.” – Ajahn Sumedho

“Man does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination.” – George Gurdjieff

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” – Schopenhauer

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” – Socrates

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“To be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight . . . and never stop fighting.” – E. E. Cummings

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.” – Bertrand Russell

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.” – Simone Weil

“What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.” – Albert Pine

“Grasping at things can only yield one of two results: Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear. It is only a matter of which occurs first.” – Goenka

“If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem.” – Robert Anthony

Most people are caught between what they know they should do, and what they think they have to do.

“It is not wise to be wiser than necessary.” – Philippe Quinault

Emotionally beating yourself up is not helping yourself or the world; it does not change the past, nor does it change the future; it only makes the present miserable.

“We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.” – Phyllis Diller

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn’t it?

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” – Will Rogers

A closed mind is bolted from the inside.

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.” – Mark Twain

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.” – Mark Twain

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” – Mark Twain

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” – Mark Twain

“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience.” – Lillian Smith

“Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life.” – Goethe

“The world is a comedy to those who think; a tragedy to those who feel.” – Horace Walpole

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather, try to become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein

“I always knew that I’d look back at my tears and laugh, but I never thought that I’d look back at my laughter and cry.” – Rudy Kazootie

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.” – Dorothy Day

“Life has no limitations, except the ones you make.” – Les Brown

“One who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” – Muhammad Ali

Power is never brought to an end by power. The eternal law is that power ends by love.

May all your dreams but one come true, for without that dream there is nothing left to live for.

“The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides…” – Henri Frederic Amiel